meekrohprocess

My grandparents told it differently.

To them, it was a dark colloquialism from the world wars. Infantry would often talk to each other about how they were looking forward to "buying a farm" once the war was over and they went home to their families.

When the soldiers died in the trenches, as they often did, it was said that they had "bought the farm" as a euphemism. Usually it was better than saying how they actually died.

Probably. I loved touring the US parks while doing remote work, and I miss the freedom of being able to wander around anywhere and sort of ignore roads, but I wouldn't have been able to live in many of the areas that I adored.

One thing that people underestimate about the US is its vast size. When you live in a city, you have at least a dozen grocery stores within an hour's drive. When you live in a rural area, you drive at least an hour into "the city" which has a Walmart and a Kroger.

There are exceptions, like Utah which is basically one giant city/suburb/church running along the Great Salt Lake with a half-dozen national parks to the South. But I would lean towards this being a temporary trend for most people.

Or they'll paint their head like a soccer ball to make sure that the updated AI works properly. These sorts of failures demand stress-tests. What if a future team has a soccer-ball-headed mascot?

There's an H.P. Lovecraft story about that: At the Mountains of Madness.

Although, back in his day they thought that Antarctica already had a giant inland sea. Jules Verne also wrote about the idea in some of his stories. It's hard to imagine these days, but there used to be parts of the earth's surface that nobody had ever surveyed in fairly contemporary times.

I don't think the sans culotte were part of the wealthy classes...doesn't it translate to something like, "without fancy pants"?

I could see an argument that Zuck and Murdoch are like pied pipers leading the modern sans culotte around by the nose, though. I'm not looking forward to the upcoming Terrors, in that analogy.

No cortex-M microcontroller will run Linux without several megabytes of external RAM, and their lack of an MMU makes it difficult even then.

You can program them with normal C code or thumb-2 assembly, but the peripherals on SAMD chips aren't very intuitive if you want to program them bare-metal.

They have a much shallower learning curve and a large moat of people who have used them for decades, simple as that. These days, AVR chips are a stepping stone to learning embedded development.

They're fine for very cash-strapped beginners, but it would behoove new developers to leave them behind quickly. They are more expensive and less efficient than modern options, and you won't find many well-paying jobs asking for AVR/Arduino experience.

STM32 chips are a much better option, IMO, especially for beginners. They come in sizes ranging from <$1 Cortex-M0 chips up to dual-core Cortex-A/Cortex-M processors, and they use the same sorts of peripherals across all of those product lines. So you can start small, and incrementally learn about more complex parts and topics.

And if you really need a breadboard-friendly chip, an MSP430 is probably a better option. It's a 16-bit MCU focused on power efficiency, and it has GCC/Arduino ('Energia') support. Some of them also have non-volatile FRAM memory.

Like the article says, it's just a C program.

So you can compile with -g and use a debugger like GDB to step through it, set breakpoints, probe memory and registers, etc.

WiFi is a difficult protocol, so it makes sense to use a radio coprocessor. The ESP8266 can also have trouble running non-trivial applications while reliably handling WiFi, and in 2020 a Cortex-M0 chip is probably at least as cost effective as an 8-bit micro.

They don't need those chips to make your coffee, they need them to connect to the internet and to avoid hiring expensive experts. 5 years from now this might use a single ESP32-S2, but it doesn't seem outrageous, especially when the machine also has a display.

Plus, as a bonus, you can use it to mine Monero! Small correction to the article, STM32F0s have a PLL so they aren't limited to the crystal's 8MHz frequency. They're rated for 48MHz, but you can also overclock them.

Oh, that makes sense. It did seem like a lot for such a small processor to handle.

Still, that sounds even cooler; a reference for how to set up a local network of MCUs controlled by a big processor? Awesome.

Neat! If I'm reading the repository right, it looks like the avionics firmware ran on a TMS570 Cortex-R microcontroller made by TI:

https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Category:TMS570

I'm pleasantly surprised to see that instead of a big Cortex-A or x86/64 chip. It's cool to read well-funded code for a small realtime SoC.

you don't see them too often outside of things like memory controllers and safety-critical products, but Cortex-R chips can have some cool features like ECC memories and mirrored CPUs:

https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors/cortex-r/co...

Apparently the next generation Cortex-R82s will also have 64-bit options with an MMU, which should make it easy to run a "real" OS.

Too bad that the company didn't work out, but it was nice of them to publish this stuff.